German Sierra, left, had no cooking experience when he left Honduras in 2000. Now head chef of Viet Taste restaurant in Falls Church, he learned to cook Vietnamese food in several kitchen jobs. Owner Thi Quach, right, taught Sierra Viet Taste's dishes by showing him: “I said, ‘this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it tastes.’ "

| By Luz Lazo |

When German Sierra gets an order for a plate of bun cha hanoi, he knows exactly what to do.

He has cooked the pork dish — with noodles, greens and pickled vegetables — many times, and knows exactly how much fish sauce, salt and spices to add.

Outside his kitchen, the customers who are mostly Vietnamese are expecting to eat authentic Vietnamese cuisine. And Sierra makes them just that.

“When I left my country I never imagined that I would be cooking this food,” Sierra, 39, said in Spanish. “You come here ignoring all about other cultures and foods.”

A native of Honduras, Sierra has mastered the art of Vietnamese cuisine while working at Asian restaurants in the Washington region. As head chef of Viet Taste at the Eden Center in Falls Church, he cooks, reads and even speaks Vietnamese.

Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all it takes. That’s the city’s idea in Petworth, where D.C.’s Office of Planning merged art and urban redevelopment in April, teaming with a local foundation and an out-of-town design firm to host an street art project at the intersection of Colorado and 14th Avenues Northwest.

At the event, organizers handed out copies of the city’s renovation plan (PDF), called the Central 14th Street Vision Plan and Revitalization Strategy, for this historically black, middle-class neighborhood. In the plan, Petworth is described as a gritty and hip, relatively low-rent “arts-based niche” neighborhood. With this brand in mind, city planners are banking on the arrival of industrious, young creative types — to help pound down a few nails.

“We’re using art very deliberately,” said Harriet Tregoning the city’s planning director, while Petworth’s young and old, black, Caribbean, Latino and white residents painted on the pavement nearby.

People talk about gentrification in code: “changing” neighborhoods combine an influx of “artists,” (young, white, and educated) and “young professionals” (more tucked-in, well-heeled versions of the former), with “longtime residents,” (black residents, many in an older age bracket—who comprised 88 percent of Petworth’s community in 1990 but 57 percent by 2010, according to D.C.’s Urban Institute).

After graduating from college and struggling for two years, Kharananda Rizal took all the money he had—which was $20—and started a boarding school for children in a rural area. Rizal used this small amount of money to buy five pairs of tables and benches to serve as desks and used the rest of the money to rent a classroom.

By the end of the first month, he had 30 students, all of which he taught himself. When he had saved enough to start construction on a new school building, at night, after classes were over, Rizal would haul bricks up the stairs on his back for laborers to use the next morning.

Now the school, started 18 years ago, has more than 1,000 students and is one of the best schools in its region based on academics.

Rizal’s story, of starting from nothing and building a successful school using his brain and his hands, seems to be the embodiment of the American Dream.

When asked where his home is, Laxman Dulal, 27, takes a lengthy pause to consider his answer.

His home is not Nepal, where he lived with his family for seven years, largely confined to a crowded refugee camp. Bhutan, the place where he was born, also seems unlikely — he left when he was six, and barely remembers his life there.

“For the sake of identity, I would say Bhutan,” says Dulal, who is tall and wears his American T-shirt and jeans comfortably. “In fact, it is a big challenge for us to say, ‘Who am I?’ ”

Dulal came to the United States four years ago. He and his family were some of the first refugees from Bhutan to be resettled in Riverdale, Md., by the International Rescue Committee. The original exodus from his home country followed what Dulal describes as an “ethnic cleansing,” perpetrated by a Buddhist regime intent on driving out Hindu citizens.

Dulal’s own father, a literate businessman and leader in their small agricultural town in Bhutan, was taken to prison for nine months and tortured.

“The government wanted to know what is going on in this community,” Dulal says of the reasons for his father’s torture. “He was released under terms that he would leave the country in seven days.”

Bhutan is small, roughly the size of Maryland itself, and nestled between China, India and Nepal. Close to third of the country’s population resettled in refugee camps in Nepal in the early 1990s, where many of them spent the next 20 years. Starting in 2008, 50,000 refugees were resettled in the United States from the camps, with about 75 families settling in the same gated apartment complex, Parkvew Gardens, in Riverdale.

Dulal, who went to college in India and speaks English well, is an employee of the Association of Bhutanese in America. It’s his job to ensure that the refugees, many of whom speak minimal English, learn how to use the bus system and know where to go to buy groceries.

“People don’t have a sense of much responsibility,” he says. “They have dependency syndrome. People have been living in these camps for so many years—it takes them a couple of years to get rid of those syndromes.”

Dulal, who lives elsewhere, says that he makes a trip to Parkview Gardens almost every day of the week. On Sunday mornings, he and his wife, Maya Mishra, teach some of the older refugees, who range from middle-aged to elderly, how to speak English.

‘My name is…’

It’s raining steadily on this particular Sunday morning, and because of this, Mishra says that many of the students may not come today. Nevertheless, she and Dulal pull folding chairs from a stack resting against the wall and set them up in neat rows facing the front of the room, where a small whiteboard is propped up on a folding table.

The class is held in a small community room in the apartment complex, so the students don’t have far to travel. One by one, they trickle in, folding their hands together and murmuring “Namaste” by way of greeting. One woman carries her notebook and pencil in a crumpled, plastic McDonald’s bag. All are dressed in brightly colored traditional clothing, punctuated, here and there, by a few too-big sport coats and bomber jackets.

Mishra takes her place at the front of the class. She, like her husband, studied in India, and has been speaking English for years. She’s much younger than her pupils, and as she begins the lesson in rapid Nepalese, they stop speaking amongst themselves and turn their attention toward her. They pass around a sign-in sheet and painstakingly print their names in English—Jaja Rai, Ganga Devi.

Mishra explains that the students are going to introduce themselves in English, and one by one, they stand up and state their name, address and where they live. Some of them need gentle reminders to say their apartment number or the road they live on. When each one sits down, their classmates applaud them.

Today’s lesson starts off with money. Mishra holds up paper bills and asks the class what denomination they are, and they answer in unison, as best they can. She also teaches them how to set up a basic addition problem, writing it on the board and circling around the room to see if each student has copied it correctly into their notebook.

“Tiksa!” she exclaims when she is pleased — the Nepalese word for “good.”

According to Dulal, the class doesn’t follow any set curriculum. “These people are the real beginners,” he explains. Many of them aren’t even literate in Nepalese, their native tongue. The class focuses on practical English that will help them in their everyday lives.

Tomato, bean, potato, mushroom

Last week, the class learned how to say the names of different types of fruit. This week, they are learning the names of vegetables, so they will be able to ask for them if they can’t find them in the supermarket. Mishra says that many of them are used to eating heavier foods, such as rice, but that she has been encouraging them to take advantage of the fresh produce that the supermarket will stock in the coming summer months.

Students are still filtering in the door, drops of rain clinging to their clothing. Every once in a while a student will approach the whiteboard to examine something more closely. Mishra writes the name of each vegetable carefully on the board before pronouncing it and asking the class to say it with her.

As Dulal explains it, each student is at a different level. Some of them have been here for several years and have been learning English since they first came, while others are new to the U.S. and the language. Each lesson starts with a review. Some of them were also helped by volunteers, who visited them individually in their homes. The goal isn’t fluency, but rather, a basic knowledge.

“There are those who just want to learn 0, 1, 2, 3, A, B, C, D,” Mishra says. “It’s rather tough to include all of them in one lesson plan.”

The students are enthusiastic, especially when Dulal wraps up the lesson with a word game. He divides them into two teams, pitting one half of the room against the other. The first team chooses a word; the second team then has to think of another word that starts with the last letter of the word before. There are basic words, such as “eat” and even “Nepal,” but the students also call out “telephone” and “elephant.” They are visibly proud of themselves as the list on the whiteboard grows longer.

As the class draws to a close, the students say goodbye to each other and to Dulal and Mishra, bowing their heads and bringing their hands together once more to say “Namaste.” They know to come back at the same time next week. It’s still raining when they leave.

‘We could only take whatever we could carry’

While learning English this late in life is no easy task, it is Dulal’s hope that these students will better be able to navigate their new home with even just a few words of English in their vocabulary.

For some, though, it’s probably too late. Mano and Sasharaswati Phuyal, who are 94 and 78, live with one of their sons in a small apartment in Parkview Gardens. They have vivid memories of losing their farm and all of their livestock — including goats, sheep, and cows — when they were forced to leave Bhutan.

“We could only take whatever we could carry,” Sasharaswati Phuyal, Mano’s wife, says through translation. “I was crying the whole journey. I am crying now when I am talking about this.”

Dulal says that these two don’t attend the classes, spending much of their time inside the small apartment. They frequently mention a son who is still in Nepal with his wife, a son who was their primary caretaker before they came to the U.S. without him. His immigration process has been delayed due to his wife, a Nepalese citizen. The injustices that the Phuyals faced in Bhutan still haunt them, and have been difficult to move past.

“They treated over 100,000 people very badly,” Sasharaswati Phuyal says of the regime that forced her out of her home country. “There is no one to do justice for our cause.”

Sasharaswati and her husband don’t necessarily want to go back—all they want is for their son to be able to join them here. Dulal explains that despite what the son thinks, there is nothing that the family can do. Their sadness is evident, a reminder that to many of the refugees, this country may never feel like home.

‘They will definitely give me a call’

The grant that funds Dulal’s work with the refugees is up in September, and he doesn’t know if he will continue to get paid — at that point, he’ll have only his income as a part-time teller at Bank of America to depend on. This doesn’t mean his work will end, though.

“I’ve gotten used to the people now,” he says, emphasizing his familiarity with the small community. “They will definitely give me a call.”

He describes the panicked phone calls he sometimes gets when someone has been in a car accident or someone’s mother needs to be taken to the hospital — no one is shy about contacting him at all hours of the day or night.

“It’s not just working for ABA,” Mishra adds. “Just for humanitarian’s sake also, we have to do what we can.”

On the outside, the Caboose Cafe and Bakery in Alexandria, Va., appears to be just another sandwich shop. The restaurant’s red and yellow awning repeats the words bakery and café, and window decals promote gourmet coffee and artisan bread. Stay-at-home moms and nannies park their designer strollers at bistro tables next to water dishes for neighborhood dogs.

But a closer look at the restaurant’s menu reveals another option — a taste of Ethiopia.

Owner Rhoda Worku, 52, said customers are often surprised to discover Ethiopian food is offered there. From sambusa, a savory appetizer filled with lentils or meat, to zilzil tibbs, beef strips seasoned with tomatoes and onions, Caboose Café belies its exterior.

“It wasn’t in my plan at all,” Worku said about serving food from her home country.

A slender woman with a slight accent, she said some of her regular customers suggested that she offer a few Ethiopian dinner entrees. Now, those same customers request injera, a traditional African flatbread, rather than a baguette with their lunchtime soup.

If food represents a community, Worku is an ambassador to the Northern Virginia neighborhood of Del Ray, which is itself on the edge of contrasts and changes that reflect the region’s shifting demographics. Worku, who speaks Amharic at home and became a U.S. citizen in 1995, doesn’t advertise her Ethiopian menu. She attributes its popularity — the restaurant serves mostly Ethiopian food in the evening — to word-of-mouth exposure, she said.

The end of the block

Worku named the restaurant after a red train caboose that sits perpendicular to Caboose Café, at an elementary school where she occasionally teaches Ethiopian cooking classes. It’s also a nod to the fact that her restaurant anchors the end of the street block — and the edge of Del Ray.

Steps away from the restaurant, a green directional sign points bicyclists north for Arlandria and south for Del Ray. One street divides these blocks-turned-neighborhoods that can’t really be called Arlington, but aren’t like the rest of Alexandria. They sit at opposite ends of two-mile Mount Vernon Avenue in terms of geography, cultural identity and zip codes. The estimated median household income in the Arlandria is slightly below $50,000, compared with nearly $75,000 in Del Ray.

Along the avenue, Arlandria is more run-down and less tree-lined than its southern neighbor. Clunkier strollers dot this end of the thoroughfare, and Latino bakeries and grocery stores are commonplace. Many construction and traffic signs are written in both English and Spanish.

In contrast, Del Ray is lined with purple flags proclaiming itself as the place, “where Main Street still exists.” President Barack Obama has visited two of its eateries for brick oven pizza and frozen custard. A gluten-free bakery and bicycle co-op recently opened a few blocks away from an organic dry cleaner and all-natural pet food store.

A self-described people person, Worku left her 15-year baking job to launch her restaurant near this street intersection in May 2004. She calls it a family business, as her two college-aged sons still sometimes help run the cash register and sell bread at the year-round farmer’s market. She considered moving her family closer to the restaurant, but said high real estate prices dissuaded her. She said Del Ray’s bungalows and Cape Cods hardly stay on the market for long, and the price rarely drops.

“The neighborhood is changing. When we came to this place, especially this block, it wasn’t like this,” Worku said. “There wasn’t much traffic, but now you see people walking at night. The houses are changing. Everyone’s remodeling their homes.”

At home in Virginia

Worku came to the United States from Ethiopia three decades ago, saying she left because of problems in the country. In the 1980s, Ethiopia experienced a series of civil wars and famines that killed more than one million people. Worku joined an estimated 200,000 Ethiopians who live in the United States, according to the 2010 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.

She said she first traveled to California to study accounting at a community college and then followed her now-husband to Springfield, Va., where they live today. She attends one of the dozen churches in Northern Virginia that cater to Ethiopians, but said they can barely hold all of the congregants.

The restaurant has few, if any, Ethiopian or other African immigrants as customers, Worku said. She said once they realize the coffee shop also sells Ethiopian food, it probably wouldn’t be authentically spicy enough for them. Her customers come almost exclusively from the neighborhood, which is comprised of young and middle-aged educated professionals who are mostly, but not all, white.

“It’s the perfect place for them,” Worku said about Del Ray.

Candice Mitchell, who is 30 and African American, is one of those residents. Even though she has never sampled the Ethiopian menu at Caboose Café, she said she knows it’s there.

“It’s just hidden,” Mitchell said with a smile.

A lifelong Del Ray resident, Mitchell went through the Alexandria public school system and continues to live in her childhood home. She said she enjoys the neighborhood and is surprised by how well known Del Ray has become.

“I never had a reason to leave,” Mitchell said, shrugging her shoulders.

The Howard University graduate is a program coordinator at the Mount Vernon Recreation Center, located in the heart of Del Ray. She chatted about her neighborhood while painting glitter onto foam discs in preparation for a cheerleading competition at the center.

Mitchell said all of the change in Del Ray is positive, from new lofts for sale to a proposed trolley service from Old Town Alexandria. But she said she does worry how it could affect some of the city’s low-income families.

“It will definitely change the population and dynamics of the area,” Mitchell said. She said she expects a lot of working-class residents in Arlandria will move to the west end of Alexandria near Landmark Mall, where housing is more affordable.

About a mile from Mitchell’s office in the Arlandria half of Mount Vernon Avenue, a wooden sign introduces a cul-de-sac of apartments as Chirilagua. Named after a small southeastern city in El Salvador, Chirilagua is home to an enclave of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The neighborhood primarily draws native Bolivians, Hondurans and Salvadorans.

Residents such as Diana Cisneros, 21, settled there in order to ease the transition to the United States. Cisneros moved to Virginia from El Salvador with her mother and two sisters when she was 8 years old. She said they moved in search of a better, more peaceful life, and she couldn’t imagine living in any other community.

“I’m just used to it,” Cisneros said about her neighborhood.

Cisneros works as a receptionist at the Arlandria-Chirilagua Housing Cooperative, which provides apartments at affordable prices. It’s across from a planned construction site that will demolish an existing strip mall along Mount Vernon Avenue. In its place, there will be two, six-story buildings with about 500 apartments and 53,000 square feet of retail space. The developer agreed to reserve 28 affordable rental units in exchange for the right to build two extra stories.

The project has sparked debate across Alexandria about how an influx of newcomers might raise housing prices and clog roads. In Del Ray, St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub owner Nora Partlow said she was upset when she learned the construction project had been approved. She said the city needed to first sort out its infrastructure, such as the bus line.

But Partlow said the planned development is just one of many changes she has experienced since moving to the area in 1985. When she first arrived, she said Del Ray was hardly a destination.

Instead, she said it was plagued with drugs and prostitution, and people didn’t walk around at night. So when a space opened along Mount Vernon Avenue in April 1996 and she drafted plans on the back of a napkin to open the first “upscale” coffee shop, she said people laughed and called her crazy.

That winter, the coffee shop expanded to fill a thousand square feet and a steady string of customers. Today, it’s a popular Del Ray institution — its motto is “the community gathering place” — that serves local food, displays local art and hosts local musicians. On any given day, a local florist jots notes with an engaged couple, a group of senior citizens chats over coffee and streams of yarn connect a group of women who meet every other Tuesday for their knitting club.

Partlow, who also works as a realtor, calls her coffee shop “artsy and cool.”

“The neighborhood is turning around,” Partlow said, a pashmina covering her shoulders. “There’s a different class of customers coming in.”

She said some condos down the streets are selling for nearly $900,000, saying, “That price was unheard of a few years ago.”

Still, she said she worries not only about where some of the city’s lower income residents will live, but also where her own employees will live. One of the St. Elmo’s job requirements is that employees be able to walk to work, which is open 16 hours a day, 364 days a week. Partlow said she lives within biking distance.

“Even young people can’t live here,” Partlow said. “It’s very hard to live here.”

Where everybody knows your name

Partlow worked with Worku at a bakery for several years, and eventually mentored her into starting Caboose Café two blocks away. From coffee to Ethiopian food, Worku said nowadays people living in the region are knowledgeable about international cuisines. She said she is thinking of hosting a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony every month.

“I remember when I came first to this country. When you say Ethiopia, they don’t even know where it is. I’ve been asked, ‘Is it in Paris? Is it in Canada?’” Worku said.

Worku knows half of her customers by at least their first name, saying that some of the neighborhood children call out greetings or news of a lost tooth to “Miss Rhoda.” She said the vegan sampler, such as yellow peas mixed with chili powder, is a popular choice among Del Ray parents who are raising their children as vegetarians.

“I love the kids when they come in and tell me what happened at school or at their birthday,” Worku said. “It’s just a little neighborhood.”

Because Jinwon Lee has the day off from work, and because his two sons are on spring break, and because the weather is beautiful, Lee has taken his sons to his favorite spot for fishing.

They’re sitting on the side of an embankment underneath a three-lane highway. They have their rods cast into Four Mile Run, an urban stream in Northern Virginia that feeds directly into the Potomac River.

“We love this place,” Lee says, as his sons, George, 11, and Hyunwook, 8, stare at the water for any signs of movement. Lee emigrated to the U.S. six years ago from South Korea and now works at a post office in his home of Falls Church, Va.

For bait, the Lees are using a mixture of sweet corn and Maseca, a Mexican brand of masa cornmeal sold in most grocery stores in this area. Jinwon Lee has his own black leather rod-carrying case with his name written on it in Korean.

“Hey, careful!” he exclaims as his boys play and giggle on the steep embankment.

Just upstream, about a couple hundred yards, is the Arlington County Water Pollution Control Plant, which treats 30 million gallons of wastewater every day and which dumps its treated effluent into Four Mile Run. Days before the Lee’s fishing expedition, Arlington County issued an advisory warning humans and pets to avoid contact with the stream’s waters after a sewage pipe overflowed a few miles north of where the Lee’s are currently fishing.

“I never eat the fish,” Lee says, a bit cagily. “Some guys bring the fish home and eat. But I don’t like that.”

A few minutes later, Lee catches a carp the size of his forearm. “This guy tastes really good,” he says.

Wait – didn’t he just say he never eats the fish?

“Yeah, I don’t eat it. We just eat this guy. Very good!”

Fishing is the hobby of many, but in urban streams it carries some risks that aren’t always obvious. Robert Buchanan, a former chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration and currently the director at the Center for Food Safety and Security Systems at the University of Maryland, says that fish caught in urban streams can contain “any number of different contaminates. … The big issue here is what’s being dumped into the water and what grows in the water.”

Depending on where you are, Buchanan says, the fish you catch may contain toxic chemicals, microbiological agents – also known as fecal waste – or parasites. And he says, often, there’s no way to tell with the naked eye.

“If a fish has gross malformations or open sores you shouldn’t eat it,” Buchanan says. “But [contamination] may not always be the problem you think it is.”

Buchanan says a fish might not be clean if it doesn’t give you immediate, acute problems. There’s also the issue of what he calls “bioaccumulation. It might be excess levels of lead, cadmium, pesticides, pollutants.”

Buchanan says this is why larger fish pose the greatest risk of contamination because not only do pollutants collect in their bodies, but the larger fish eat smaller fish whose bodies also contain harmful pollutants.

However, Buchanan says the urban streams of today are head and shoulders ahead of where they were as recently as 30 years ago – or as far back as 300 years ago.

“In colonial times, I’m not sure I’d want to drink any of the water,” he says. “There was no sewage treatment. There were no clean-up efforts until after World War II. … That was the first realization you could do permanent damage to the environment.”

But now, after decades of effort and countless dollars spent, urban streams like the Potomac River and its tributary, Four Mile Run, are cleaner than they’ve been in decades – though still not entirely clean. Arlington County, for example, continually issues the kinds of advisories it issued earlier this month for Four Mile Run, as the pipes in its aging sewage system are prone to bursting.

But despite this, Buchanan says fishing in urban streams such as Four Mile Run poses less of a risk than fishing in many developing countries, where pollution regulations haven’t caught up with the furious pace of industrial development. “The water supply here in the U.S. isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad,” he says.

Buchanan also suggests some surprisingly simple things public health officials can do to clean up urban waterways while also preventing people from recreating in areas that are unsafe.

“I have a house along the New Jersey beach,” Buchanan says. “On each of the storm drains there’s a little reminder that says do not dump material down here because it will wind up in the bay. It keeps people from throwing oil and dog droppings down them.”

In the meantime, Buchanan says it’s probably not a good idea to take that that Four Mile Run carp home and fry it up.

“People need to be reminded [not to pollute],” he says, “but they also need to be warned that you shouldn’t always eat what’s coming out of the water.”

For the festival, lights were displayed on the buildings on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road / Photo by Mylon Medley

From noon until midnight, empty buildings spaces were transformed to galleries, local artists performed at The Big Chair, and local restaurant owners experienced a tremendous boost in their daily profits during the Lumen8Anacostia festival.

“We liked it, we loved it, we want more,” said Fatma Nayir, commonly known as ”Mama,” owner of Mama’s Kitchen, an eatery off Martin Luther King Jr. Ave.

A common theme among festival participants was a fascination with the sense of community felt throughout Anacostia.

Not only did local business owners enjoy a booming day of sales, they also had a chance to provide newcomers to the area a taste of the community.

This is especially true for Mama, who relocated from Bethesda to Anacostia to open her eatery. What drew her to this area was the unique bond shared by members of this neighborhood.

“I’m from Turkey. MLK(Avenue) reminds me of Turkey,” she said, referring to the sense of belonging.

“Everyone calls her ‘Mama,'” Eddie Staton, chef for Mama’s added. “It’s good to see people come in and speak to the owners [of businesses], people here aren’t stand-offish.”

The event also brought people who hadn’t frequently come to Anacostia, and have continued to visit since the festival.

“We’ve seen a lot of new faces” Staton said, and they’re not the only ones.

“A lot of people came (to Anacostia) for the first time,” Phil Hutinet, chief operations officer of Arch Development Corporations, one of the sponsors of Lumen 8 Anacostia said. “Some people traveled for an hour and a half to get here.”

According to Hutinet, approximately 2,000-3,500 attended the different venues of the festival. Although many people came out to the festival at different times of the day, Nicole Bracey, 26, a local resident, said she was a little disappointed with the turnout.

“I thought the streets would be flooded,” Bracey said. In spite of this, she added, “it was really exciting. There was graffiti, portraits … jazz bands, it was lovely.”

While Bracey focused on the art aspect, Moses Smith, 48, a local social worker, saw this as an opportunity for people outside of Anacostia to see the business potential of the area.

This provided “opportunities for businesses to say, ‘Hey this may be a point for progression,’ ” Smith said.

“We want to see more of this,” he continued. It’s not enough to just have a festival like Lumen8 for a limited time, Smith said. “If you’re gonna make money in this community, we want it to stay here. Bring the businesses here.”

A sense of community brings a dash of Ireland to Anacostia

At the heart of the festival of music, lights and art are the artists who participated in the preparation and actual event.

Click to listen to Tommie Adams, an artist who participated in Lumen8Anacostia describe his unique exhibit and discuss the artistic movement in Anacostia.

(Left to Right) Johanna Leech and Lesley Cherry, two artists-in residence from Belfast, Ireland, on their last day in Anacostia at The Hive on MLK Avenue, before returning home. / Photo by Mylon Medley

Johanna Leech and Lesley Cherry are two artists who were enrolled on the Art In Residency program of ARCH. These two women, however, were not locals in any sense. They traveled all the way from Belfast, Ireland to take part of this six-week program.

It wasn’t just their Irish accent that gave them away as “foreigners.” In a section of D.C., where whites only make up 3.3 percent of the population, according to Neighborhood Info DC, it is easy to pick them out of a crowd.

When Johanna Leech first settled in the community she couldn’t help but notice this statistic. “I’m the only white person,” she remembers thinking. “I’m not used to this.”

This evident reality didn’t deter them from being actively involved in the art development project.

“We were very visible in the community,” Lesley Cherry said. “People got used to us.”

Leech was attracted to the area’s rich history and likes to collect stories. During her temporary residence in Anacostia, she took particular interest in the signs throughout the area such as; ‘Thank you ladies and gentlemen for not using profanity.’ With these quotes, she created pins with these saying printed on them. During Lumen8Anacostia she gave the pins away for free, in exchange for a story.

“This is a really warm community,” Leech said.

Not only are community members willing to share their stories with the artists, they are also curious to hear their thoughts in regards to the community.

“Many people ask me, ‘What do you think of Anacostia?’” Leech said.

Lesley Cherry was fascinated with the vocabulary of Anacostia. She decided to honor the unique lingo with this exhibit on Good Hope Road Someone told her, "I can't believe you put 'weave' up there." / Photo by Mylon Medley

Cherry was drawn to this area because it reminded her of the area she grew up in and areas she has worked in, because of their socioeconomic struggles.

She is very passionate about establishing relationships with the members of the community. She isn’t a fan of “plop art”, which, according to Cherry, is when an artist comes and quickly does a project, leaving without much interaction with the community.

“The community is very open,” she said of Anacostia.

Click to listen to Chris Naoum, an attendee of Lumen8 also discuss “pop up” exhibits as he questions whether Lumen8Anacostia is good for the community.

Keeping it going

While April 14 marked the grand event, the arts initiative in Anacostia isn’t over, Hutinet said.

Since the launch of Lumen8Anacostia, there have been different arts events every Saturday. Organizers of the festival also held a community feedback forum May 2 to gauge the community’s reaction to the event.

Although the Art Residency program has ended and Cherry and Leech have returned to Belfast, their art has remained visible along Martin Luther King Jr. Ave, and Good Hope Road.

“It’s nice to be on the cusp of something,” Cherry said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Sitting in his Silver Spring bakery filled with the aroma of fresh baked bread, Glayson Silva, looks around the busy shop and says, ““I do pretty well here.”

Its half an hour before close and the buffet filled with Brazilian cuisine has already been packed up for the night but traffic continues to stream into Brazilian Bakery as others walk out toting paper bags full of bread. Several patrons are planted with sandwiches and Brazilian cheese bread in front of a large screen TV broadcasting the news in Portuguese, the official language of Brazil.

Silva said he emigrated from Brazil 10 years ago looking for better opportunities. During his first seven years in the U.S., he worked in construction saving his money and waiting for the opportunity to own his own bakery.
“I like to bake bread, cook food and stuff like that. Back in Brazil I started working in a bakery when I was maybe 12 years old,” he said. “So the whole time that I’m here, I’m like I want to buy a bakery.”

Silva is the owner of Brazilian Bakery in Silver Spring; he bought the business from an older Brazilian man about three years ago. The business has been in the Aspen Manor shopping center on Georgia Avenue for about 10 years he said.